New Venture Partners portfolio company, Silicon Hive, acquired by Intel

MURRAY HILL, USA: New Venture Partners, the global venture capital firm dedicated to corporate technology spin-outs, announced that its portfolio company, Silicon Hive, a spin-out from Philips Electronics (Philips), has been acquired by Intel Corp.

Silicon Hive was incubated by Philips to commercialize parallel processing technology for semiconductor Systems-on-Chip (SoC). In 2007, Philips decided to spin out Silicon Hive as an independent, venture-backed company. New Venture Partners structured the transaction, transitioning the Silicon Hive business -- team, relationships, products, technology and related intellectual property -- out of Philips and into a start-up company. New Venture Partners led the Series A investment in Silicon Hive with initial participation from TVM Capital.

New Venture Partners has shared the vision of Silicon Hive in providing flexible, high-performance multimedia solutions for consumer electronics. “The spin-out enabled the business to pursue its natural broader market,” said Anton Arts, Venture Partner, New Venture Partners. “From our first identification of the opportunity inside Philips, through the spin-out, development of the business, and eventual sale to Intel, we have been impressed by the great accomplishments of the CEO, Atul Sinha, and his team.”

New Venture Partners and Intel Capital have collaborated in a number of earlier investments including Flarion Technologies and Sychip, and are pleased to continue this successful track record. Intel Capital is unmatched in its experience as a strategic investor and added tremendous value to the Silicon Hive technology through key strategic introductions and essential technology and product development guidance.

“New Venture Partners and Intel Capital never shied away from the heavy lifting involved in making Silicon Hive the success it is today,” said Atul Sinha, CEO of Silicon Hive. “It has been a great pleasure partnering with New Venture Partners and Intel Capital. They’ve been with us from the early stages, and have been strategic advisors on our product and business development along the way. We now target phenomenal successes inside Intel in the delivery of differentiated multimedia experiences in Atom-processor based SoCs.”

“Spin-out investments have unique challenges and New Venture Partners is differentiated by its capability to discover early-stage innovations within corporations and bring them to the institutional venture capital community,” said Marcos Battisti, MD at Intel Capital. “New Venture Partners spotted Silicon Hive’s disruptive technology early, and successfully worked both with Intel Capital as an early investor, and also Intel as an early customer for Silicon Hive’s imaging and video technology.”

Silicon Hive contributes to Intel’s plans to become the processor architecture of choice across a variety of smart device and market segments -- netbooks and laptops, cars, smart phones, tablets and smart TVs. The Silicon Hive capabilities will aid in the delivery of Intel’s more differentiated Atom-processor based SoCs as multimedia and imaging grow in importance across the mobile smart device segments.